A Madman and His Pawn
by CrypticCalico
Summary: “Why should I stop when the whole time she’s been telling me to GO?” -- A brief history of the Joker through the eyes of a childhood friend.
1. The Scars

**A/N – This was originally going to be a one-shot, but I've decided to chop it into a few short chapters. It will probably be a two- or three-shot, but possibly a bit longer if I have ideas. This is also my first Batman fanfic, so I'm still sort of learning about the Joker's character, and I attempt to explore him a bit more in this. I apologize in advance for anything that might seem OOC. And also, I truthfully and wholeheartedly tried not to make this character a Mary-Sue. **

**Anyways, sorry for the long author's note. Hope you enjoy this. :)**

**WARNING: Mature themes. Rating may go up in later chapters.**

_He hasn't always been this way._

Pastel moonbeams filter down through the open window, illuminating the center of my bedroom in a soft pale glow, and casting the corners into murky shadows. The muted silver-white colour makes him look even more haggard, the lines in his face deeper and more pronounced. A slight breeze drifts through, gently rustling the lacy white curtains that adorn the window frame, along with select few strands of the limp green strings of hair that hang over his forehead. His clothes and mine lay strewn about the floor where they'd landed without consideration, no more than a few hours ago.

I sit up in bed, hugging the sheets around my knees as I scrutinize him in the chair he's fallen asleep in beside the window. After we're done in bed, he's never slept beside me, not once. And for some unfathomable reason, this irks me. It may possibly be because I've known him for so long, but it also might be because I know I'm the only one. I know I am; he's known me all his life, who else would he trust to come to with his pent-up sexual needs? Well, perhaps not trust. After what he's gone through, I don't think he can trust anyone again. And somewhere deep down, I know he doesn't really want to.

I still remember the first time I saw those scars.

We were nine, still finding ourselves in the beginning of that stage when we no longer considered ourselves children. I was an introvert and so was he; we both always had a difficult time making friends, and were just glad to have found someone to confide in. He was my closest friend, so without a doubt I had begun to wonder when he missed a week of school without a word or a phone call.

Another week passed. And another, and another, until more than a month had gone by and still he hadn't returned.

Then he came back.

You could almost hear the simultaneous intake of breath from every person in the room when he walked into our first class. A whirr of emotions buzzed through the room like an electric wave: alarm, horror, shock, dismay … But not pity, or sympathy, or compassion. Young as I was, I couldn't understand it.

He hung his head as he made his way to his desk, every pair of eyes in the room fixed on his face. No one could stop staring even after he sat down.

Two uneven, puckered cuts disfigured his round cheeks, still slightly chubby in his youth. One on each side of his face, sawed jaggedly from the corners of his mouth all the way up to his cheekbones. They were serrated and still pink, not yet completely scarred over.

After that day, everything was different. He wasn't the same person anymore.

I could tell it hurt for him to talk for the first while, but even after the cuts had healed he refused to tell me what had happened. No amount of coaxing and gentle probing from me could convince him to tell me the story. He was withdrawn, and didn't talk to me much at all. Even though I was his only friend, he was too caught up in his own mind to pay too much attention to anything else. I didn't understand him, and I didn't know how to. I tried, tried so hard, but his mind was a fortress.

One day, a few weeks after his return to school, we found an old syringe lying in a ditch near the river in the park, while we were catching frogs. Well, I was catching frogs, anyways. He was sitting under a maple near the riverbank, silent as ever. It was all I could have done to drag him outside and spend some time with me that day.

Sometimes I wish I never had.

I was resting beside him under that tree with a frog in my hand, and a pail full of the rest of my catch beside me, when I watched him pick up that needle. He held it up between us, and I could see his eyes flicker once between it and my face. A light went on in his eyes.

"Frog," he said. Not a statement, not an observation: an order. I handed the frog to him without question, semi-pleased that he was actually paying attention to what I was doing.

He held the stationary frog tightly by the legs and dangled it upside down in front of his face, examining it intently. After a moment, he lifted the syringe and injected the murky brown water slowly under the frog's skin.

"What are you _doing?!_" I screamed at him, horrified.

As the frog began to struggle, a macabre grin spread across his face. I tugged on his arm and begged him to stop, but he simply pushed me aside and watched its skin stretch tighter and tighter as the water formed a balloon, which began to droop under the weight.

I hid my face in my hands. However, some morbid sense of curiosity soon overcame me, and I peeked through a crack between two fingers.

The smile faded from his face as he threw the empty syringe aside and poked the bubble of water. It wobbled like jelly under his finger, but didn't burst. He sighed, and then reached into his pocket for the Swiss army knife I'd gotten him for his last birthday. Flipping it open, he took a moment to admire the blade in the sunlight – and then swiftly punctured the bubble.

Its contents splattered my arm and I gasped in revulsion. I wiped it off on the grass as quickly as I could.

When I sat back up, the syringe was back in his hand and he was leaning over me to pull the bucket over my lap, and set it on the ground in between us.

He proceeded to do the exact same thing to each and every frog in that pail.

Throughout our childhood years, he continued to torture and mutilate small animals and insects with that pocketknife. And the peculiar thing was that he seemed to enjoy it. I'd never been so glad in my entire life that I didn't own a pet.

The other children avoided us at recess. At least, more so than usual after he'd gotten those scars. At first I thought, perhaps they were merely uncomfortable around him because of his scars. But slowly I began to realize – they were _frightened _of him.

And even though I couldn't bring myself to abandon him, I had to admit – so was I.


	2. Halloween

By the time we entered high school, he had become angrier and angrier inside. The last time I saw his bedroom, everything breakable inside of it was destroyed. Shattered glass littered the floor from the broken lamp, the smashed ornaments and the cracked window. The mattress was in tatters, the bed frame cracked, and every ledge on the bookshelf was split in half. Even the brightly-coloured wallpaper was ripped from the walls.

He stopped sleeping properly. Dark circles began to form under his eyes; his hair became matted and unkempt. He seldom ate, becoming scrawny and thin, and very pale. He stopped taking care of himself on the whole. No amount of persuading on my part could encourage him to do otherwise. He was a silently ticking time bomb, the slightest touch to which would set it off.

But in my opinion, I think it was the Halloween incident that finally made him snap.

There was always one kid who made fun of him. Billie Ferguson, I think her name was. She was a senior, and one of those popular type girls that nobody actually liked, but they were too scared to admit it so she had lots of friends anyway. She was attractive and knew it; she wasn't afraid to flaunt her beauty to get what and who she wanted. Billie was nice face-to-face, but trash-talked and gossiped about everyone in the school behind their back. But to people she didn't like, she was just an out and out bitch. And one of those people happened to be him.

We were sixteen, and I think that particular October 31st was the last time I was ever able to actually make him do anything with me. I was also fairly sure this would be the last time we would ever go trick-or-treating, as we were getting older and starting to drop such child-like things. At least, I was. He never did much of anything, to be honest, except add to his collection of knives and torment any living thing that he could. I tried to include him in most of the things that I did, because I knew that he would never go out and do them on his own. And besides, I didn't like the idea of him rotting away his entire life and never experiencing anything.

I'd bought him a mask to wear while I dragged him around the neighbourhood. He put it on, albeit reluctantly, commenting: "What's the advantage of anonymity if it only lasts for one night? It would be much more beneficial to be always unidentifiable, to everyone."

I assured him that it was all in good fun, and asked him why in the world any person would never want anyone to know who they were. His answer: "Because having no identity means that you're no one. And when you're no one, you can be anyone."

I tried not to speculate too much on what kinds of meanings this explanation might have. I would never be able to comprehend the way his brain worked. Instead, I pulled him out the door and into the street full of trick-or-treaters.

It had gotten quite late. The steady streams of trick-or-treaters had slowed to the rare one or two every so often. The night was black with a new moon, and I would have had a hard time seeing my own hand in front of my face had it not been for the dim streetlights along the sidewalk, though truthfully they didn't help all that much.

While we were crossing the lawn in front of house 10 234 up to the steps, we were stopped by Billie Ferguson, heading the opposite way across the same lawn. As soon as I saw her, I knew she'd been looking for us.

"Know what I'm dressed up us?" she asked us sweetly. Her pretty face was covered with messily applied white paste, and two black smudges were untidily blotched around her eyes. But it was the finishing touch that really got me: the angry red that painted her mouth was also smeared sloppily up the sides of her face.

She turned to face him and grinned, flashing her perfect teeth. "You really don't know? All right then, I'll give you a clue: they look like a clown."

"Leave us alone, Billie," I said. I was positively seething. I knew I wouldn't do anything to her, and so did she. But I also knew that I couldn't account for his actions too, he was too unpredictable. This was what made me uneasy.

Billie ignored me. "Have you guessed yet? No? Well, see this?" She pointed to her mouth and grinned. "I'm always smiling. Remind you of anyone?"

"_Billie,_" I warned.

"_Chrissy,_" she mocked, laughing.

She stepped closer until she was only inches away from him, reached up, and pulled off his mask, discarding it on the grass beside her. He stood there silently, impassive as she ran her fingers slowly over the scars on his face, her eyes glinting. I watched nervously.

Her mouth twisted derisively as she leaned up and whispered something into his ear that I could not hear.

All of a sudden, his eyes blazed. Before I could shout a word of warning, he'd grabbed her and thrown her up against the wall of the house. Billie squeaked and struggled as he held her there with one hand, reaching into his pocket with the other. My heart pounded a million miles an hour against my ribcage. I had never realized he was so strong.

Her eyes went wide with horror as he slowly pulled out a pocketknife and held it up to her face.

"You want to know how I got these scars?" he asked her. Billie whimpered.

"One day, I'm walking home after school and I get stopped by this guy. He pulls me into an alley, and shoves me against a wall, telling me to give him all my money. I tell him I have no money, and ohhhh, no, he's not too happy about _that_." He clicked his tongue on the last letter, making the word sound sharp and severe.

"So he pulls out this knife, and sticks it in my mouth, like this." He stuck the knife in Billie's mouth, making her wail and squirm. "And he gives me these." He grinned and cackled, turning his head from side to side so she can see his scars better. Billie bit back a sob.

I knew I had to stop him now, or he wouldn't stop. He had that _look_ in his eye; the same one I saw when he was ready to take the life of one of his numerous torture victims.

I approached him slowly. I put a hand on his arm and he looked down at me.

"Stop," I said.

"Why should I stop when the whole time she's been telling me to GO?" he asked me, his eyes dark and wild. He pushed the knife hard against the side of Billie's mouth.

A bead of blood appeared. A tear rolled down Billie's face, a trail of dark make-up running over the white on her cheek.

"Please," I begged him. "Stop. Do it for me."

I'd never felt so helpless, or so scared. Adrenaline pumped through my veins like it was the only thing my blood was made of.

He stared down at me, his face contemplative. That moment seemed to last forever.

Finally, he dropped Billie. She fell in a sobbing heap on the ground. The blood from the side of her mouth a grisly darker colour against the red of her make-up, and dark streaks ran down her face and neck as she cried.

I grabbed his arm and led him away quickly. That look had not disappeared from his eye, and I was afraid for what might happen if we stayed. I left him on his doorstep and hurried home.

To this day, I still don't know why he stopped then. If it _was _for me, though I highly disbelieve that it was, I thank him for it with all my heart. Whatever other inconceivable reason it might have been, though, I was just glad that he had stopped.

That night in bed, I stayed up all night worrying if she would press charges against him. As I did so, my mind drifted to the story he had told her. I wondered if it was true. Somehow, I didn't think so.

The next morning, Billie Ferguson was found dead in her front yard. She had bled to death from a stab wound to the neck. Imagining that, bleeding profusely and unable to call out, only a few feet away from people who could have helped her, sickened me.

Did it surprise me that she had wound up dead? Astonishingly, no, it didn't. I couldn't condone the fact that it was him, without a doubt, who had murdered her. But even as I returned to school the next day, I couldn't quite bring myself to desert him. I was all he had. I didn't have the heart.

I never asked him about Billie's death, and he never told me about it.

I always had my own suspicions of how he'd gotten those scars. Both his mother and father were heavy drinkers, and they held hardcore drinking parties each and every weekend. Their ring of friends that attended these parties weren't much better. None of them cared much for anything unless their system was shot full of alcohol.

Once I'd been over to his house when we were seven, and they were hosting one of these parties. We hid in his bedroom the entire time. He wouldn't let me leave the room for anything. The one time he ventured out to get a snack for us, I heard crashing and screaming from the kitchen. When he returned to the bedroom, there were already purpling bruises on his face and neck.

It was inevitable that eventually someone would inform the authorities. When we were in the eleventh grade, he was taken away from his parents and sent to live in a foster home in another part of the city. Some time later, I heard that he'd run away.

He didn't try to contact me, or visit me. It was almost as if he'd dropped off the face of the earth. But I never forgot him.

People began to approach me and talk to me after he left; I made new friends. I graduated from Gotham High. My eighteenth birthday came and went. I moved out of my parents' house, and was working at three part-time jobs so I could make enough money to get into a good university.

Then one night, I heard a knocking on my window.


	3. Insanity

**A/N - Last chapter, guys :( I had so much fun writing this, I'm sorry its over. Oh well. Maybe I'll make a sequel and turn it into a longer story if I get any ideas :P Thank you guys so much for all your support, you really have been giving me fantastic reviews. After I read one I'm always on cloud nine for hours afterward, so I thank you for that! :D**

**Oh yes, I thought I should inform you, this chapter has forced me to change the rating to the big 'M'. You have been warned. :)**

I was just getting ready for bed, and wasn't entirely sure if I'd heard it at first. I pulled my pajama top over my head and stopped, listening. I heard it again; something was definitely knocking against my window. I couldn't see anything outside though; it was too dark. Out of the two bedrooms in the house I shared with my roommate, I'd gotten stuck with the one that had the view of the brick building next to us.

I walked cautiously over to the window and squinted into the darkness. I always left it open a crack at night to let a breeze through, and I leaned down and peered through the opening between the window and the sill.

All of a sudden, there was a face pressed up against the glass.

I shrieked and jumped back. He lifted the window and climbed agilely into my bedroom, cackling. I stared at him with wide, shocked eyes.

"Chrissy, Chrissy, Chrissy," he said. He shook his head as he clucked his tongue and wagged his finger at me. "You always _were_ a jumpy one, weren't ya?"

I could only gawk at the man in front of me, and what he had become in such a short period of time. I hardly recognized him.

He'd let his hair grow out and had dyed it a strange, almost grass-like green. His clothes looked like something he'd randomly thrown together in a thrift shop, but they did seem to match in an odd sort of way. And his face…

His face was only a grotesque mask of the handsome, though marred, countenance it had once been. The carefully applied ghost-white greasepaint was smeared together with the obsidian black around his eyes, and the blood-red that rimmed his lips and his scars. Collectively, it gave his features quite a fear-provoking appearance. I realized with a jolt that this way exactly the way Billie Ferguson's face had been made up the last time I'd seen her before she died. Chills ran up and down my spine at this thought, making me shudder.

His eyes were shining and eerie in the muted light of my bedroom lamp, and they were filled with that animalistic dark hunger that I recognized quite quickly.

"So, long time no see, eh?" he said conversationally. His tongue flicked out from between his lips, once, and so quickly that I hadn't even been sure I'd seen correctly, until he did it again a few seconds later.

I recoiled from him, my heart frantically trying to beat its way out of my chest. He pulled a knife out of his pocket and swung it haphazardly in front of him as he advanced on me, his sinister eyes flashing.

"Miss me?" He grinned.

I kept backing away until my back bumped against the door of my closet, on the opposite wall. I gulped nervously. I guessed that running now would be completely out of the question.

He stopped suddenly, holding the bottom of the handle of the knife between his thumb and forefinger, swinging it lazily from side to side. He cocked his head, staring at me expectantly. It was then that it clicked in my mind that he was actually waiting for an answer to his question.

"Erm…" I didn't really know if there was a way to accurately answer him. On one hand, I hadn't missed him terribly, not at all_. _I'd been free to do and experience quite a few more things without him tying me down. Nobody had wanted to talk to me when he was there; his strange demeanor and frightful reputation had always kept them just out of reach. I'd always thought that I'd had problems making friends, but after he'd left, I'd realized that it hadn't been hard at all. They'd only steered clear of me because of him.

But, on the other hand…

I _had _missed him, terribly. His dark presence was oddly comforting to me, having been there all my life. He was familiar, comfortable. Even though at this particular moment in time I was deathly terrified of him, I didn't want him to leave again. He was my oldest friend.

It was dreadfully confusing for me. My sudden flurry of inner turmoil made me frown; how could something like this, just seeing his face again, be so utterly chaotic to my mind? This sent a new wave of bewilderment through me.

During my befuddled, pensive silence, he must have sensed that he was not going to get a straight answer out of me. He stepped ever closer with that menacing, glistening knife, until finally he stood no more than a few inches away from me.

"You've certainly _changed _since I've been away. Not such a, uh, _little girl_ anymore, are we?" he asked, holding the sharp edge of the blade against my collarbone. This erased every thought in my mind immediately.

"N – No," I stammered. I stared up at his face, nearly losing myself in how much _he _had changed.

He laughed.

"And did you _wait_ for me, Chrissy?" His breath fanned across my face and made me shiver. The blade pressed a little harder against my skin.

"Wait? For…?" I trailed off. I had no idea what he was getting at.

"_Me_, of course! To come back. To _claim_ you." His tongue stole out of his mouth and swirled over his bottom lip.

Claim me? I could only begin to imagine. My heart hammered rapidly with apprehension.

He grabbed my chin with his free hand and twisted my head from side to side, and his eyes narrowed as he studied me. Inspected me. The knife jiggled with his movements and dug in hard. I inhaled sharply as the blade pierced my skin.

At the sound of my distress he looked down also. He hesitated. His eyes locked onto mine, and, without looking away, he slowly leaned down and licked away the trickle of blood running down my chest. His free hand came up to grab my breast roughly.

_Oh. _

Now I understood.

He must have seen a light go on in my eyes, because he immediately straightened and grabbed at the hem of my shirt. I lifted my arms, my heart thudding. He jerked it up and over my head aggressively, throwing it to the floor.

I stood there numbly as he undressed me, still not having wrapped my mind around this. Unresisting, I let him seize my shoulders and lift me onto the dresser. My mind was fuzzy with disbelief.

When he pushed into me though, I was suddenly in a world of pain. I felt an excruciating snap as my hymen broke. He felt it too.

"Ahhhhhh. So you _did _wait," he growled, his breath hot against my ear. "You _belong _to me, Chrissy. You always have."

He continued without any consideration for me whatsoever. Tears streamed down my cheeks, agonizing pain ripping through me with his every thrust. I bit down on his shoulder hard to keep from screaming out loud. If he felt anything, he didn't acknowledge it. But I didn't ask him to stop.

Before long, pleasure began to override the pain, and I began to enjoy myself. I wondered fleetingly if my roommate was a light sleeper, and hoped to God that she wasn't. We'd gotten pretty loud.

I felt it building and building inside of me, a tightly wound ball of pleasure that was threatening to explode at any moment. Then suddenly I was over the edge, engulfed in waves of bliss. He came moments later, shuddering and moaning. I leaned on his shoulder with my arms around his sweat-slicked neck, panting.

He was still for a moment, then pushed me away and dressed quickly. He climbed swiftly back out the window and was gone. I was left sitting there on my dresser wordlessly, still in shock at what had just happened. I looked down and saw his knife, still on the dresser, a drop of my blood clinging to its tip. I knew he would be back.

That, was our first time. It has been many since then.

Now, I'm taking courses at the university I worked so hard to get into, and I even made enough to rent out my own small house. He always manages to find me, wherever I go. I'd forgotten to let him know that I was moving; and yet the first night I ever spent in my new house had been with him. Having my own place comes in very handy, especially considering what we do during his visits.

He visits me whenever it's convenient for him, be it once a month, once a week, or once a day. Whenever he needs me. And I don't really mind that, in all truth. I just wish he'd try a little foreplay once in awhile. For my sake.

He also bites me quite a bit; I look down at myself right now and see scarlet make-up smears on my skin from his lips, and red marks wherever his teeth have dug into my skin. And if I said he'd never used one of his knives in bed before, I would be lying; I now have various small scars on several parts of my body that are a result of this odd fetish.

He tells me things, sometimes. Things like why the cracks in society are so easy for him to pry open, and why people react the way they do. It fascinates him that such small disturbances in such a disorganized world can cause as enormous of upheavals as they do. He thinks he's got the mechanics of the world all figured out. He's cunning, and I'll definitely give him that. But unfortunately, he is also a madman. And I know that now.

At first, I wouldn't let myself believe that he had gone mad. I kept waiting and waiting for the piece of sanity that I was so sure would begin to shine through his veil of insanity. But it refused to manifest itself; and finally, over time, I realized sadly that it never would.

I've tried dating on and off, and it never seemed to work out. That was when I realized what he had told me that night was true. I belong to him. I always have.

I look at him now, sleeping in that chair by my window, the moonlight streaming onto his disfigured, war-painted face. And it _is _war paint. He's been fighting a war his entire life: himself, against the whole of humankind.

And I wonder exactly how it came about that I fell in love with a madman.

_End_


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